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The slaughter of protected wild horses is just one of the betrayals captured in "Saving America's Horses," a small-budget documentary opening in New York City on December 7.

Hollywood has mythologized horses for decades, but taught moviegoers little about them.

This is great for pumping millions into the entertainment and racing industries, but is terrible for U.S. horses, whose lives end more typically in unregulated, inhumane abattoirs than the lush green pastures that exist in most films and the public’s imagination.

More than one Hollywood horse has gone to slaughter after filming. But that’s small compared to the tens of thousands of horses winding up on meat hooks each year, all of them kept neatly out of public view by the slaughter industry in concert with U.S government agencies and a host of lobbyists and politicians—all of them reliant on U.S. taxpayers to fund the rounding-up of America’s wild horses and burros and the inspections of slaughterhouses, without which they cannot operate.

It’s a betrayal of both equines and Americans to say the least—a topic handled forcefully in Katia Louise’s documentary, Saving America’s Horses: A Nation Betrayed.

This small-budget film exposes the predatory exploits of the racing industry, the dangerous expulsion of America’s mustangs from designated herd-management areas on public lands and the thoroughly unregulated, commercialized slaughter business that makes more than 100,000 of them—along with other U.S. horses—disappear each year.

Saving America’s Horses features gritty and often hard-to-watch footage, along with expert testimony on the legal, ethical, economic and humane issues of saving U.S. horses from gruesome deaths at the slaughterhouse and its wild burros and horse herds from vanishing for good.

Not all of Hollywood remains tone-deaf to the horses’ plight: quite a few celebrities appear in Louise’s film to raise awareness, including Willie Nelson, Paul Sorvino, Linda Grey, Tippi Hedron and Ken Wahl.